But on Monday night, police say, she was shot and killed by a 15-year-old boy in his South Side
home.

Tayon Dunson was charged yesterday with a delinquency count of murder in Whitehead’s death,
according to a complaint filed in Franklin County Juvenile Court. He was arrested yesterday, police
said early today.

Several teenagers were inside Dunson’s home at 1253 S. Champion Ave. just after 10 p.m. on
Monday when Whitehead was shot, Columbus police said. A woman who didn’t identify herself called
911 and said, “A girl has got shot (in) my house.

“I just came out of my room,” she says in the 911 call as someone moans in the background. She
says she doesn’t know who shot the girl.

Whitehead died just before 11 p.m. at OhioHealth Grant Medical Center.

Dunson lived at the house with his mother, Keeva Dunson, who had called police just the day
before after she woke to bullet holes in the front of her house. She told police she’d heard
gunshots around 3 a.m. Sunday and saw her front window smashed and holes in her wall.

Three shell casings were found in the mulch at a house across the street.

The murder charge against her son is the latest criminal complaint against him.

He also was charged in spring 2013 with four delinquency counts of robbery and two counts of
aggravated rioting, after police say that he and three others beat two 17-year-old boys on a COTA
bus. That case is pending.

Whitehead’s mother, Danielle Whitehead, talked with Paul Aker, of WBNS-TV (Channel 10), from a
relative’s home in Canal Winchester yesterday. She said her daughter would have been a senior at
Walnut Ridge High School.

“I thought my kids were supposed to grow up and go on to college,” Danielle Whitehead said. “She
was going to make Mommy proud. She always told me she was going to make me proud.”

The mother said Shevona’s younger sister also was at the house where the shooting occurred. The
kids told her that Tayon Dunson had a gun that might have gone off accidentally, and that he ran
after shooting her daughter.

She said that her younger daughter cradled her sister after she was shot.

“She was holding her and told her to hold on, to breathe,” the mother said.

“This is someone who don’t need to be on the street,” Danielle Whitehead said of Tayon. “If you
feel it was an accident, why would you run?”

The death is the city’s 56th homicide of the year.

Anyone with information is asked to call Columbus police at 614-645-4730 or Crime Stoppers at
614-645-TIPS.